RESTAURATEUR ENJOYING FAVOR OF LOCALS

Latest incarnation of restaurant thriving four years after couple took ownership

Four years ago last weekend, Duke and Jonell Maples had been restaurant owners for less than a month, weathering an onslaught of scrutinizing visits from folks who’d been eating at previous incarnations of Rainbow Oaks for decades.

The diner hadn’t been much to look at when they bought it, but as the only restaurant in this small, sprawling community, it was an institution that the locals took seriously.

In 2013, wiser and perhaps a little wearier, the Mapleses were happy to report over eggs and orange juice on a recent morning that business in the shadow of Interstate 15 is thriving.

“It keeps getting better and better,” Duke Maples said as he settled into the corner booth with a view of the dining room.

Their restaurant, on Fifth Street in Rainbow, remains a striking departure from the dim, lived-in Rainbow Oaks of years past.

If you only had one word to describe what they did with the place, it would be “wood.” Timber that was hauled away from slopes charred by the Rice Canyon and Poomacha fires line the walls and the windowsills. The bar is a glorious, glossy slab of local cedar.

The fact that the lumber was salvaged from the aftermath of local disaster areas only gives the place more character.

Before taking over and hammering all of the sugar pine and black oak into place, Duke Maples was the food and beverage director for Marriott in Rancho Bernardo. Before that, he spent six years working as a meat specialist for Sysco, the behemoth restaurant supplier.

“My territory was all the way from San Luis Obispo to Baker to the Mexican border, so I saw a lot of restaurants, and I saw a lot of what worked and didn’t work,” Maples said. “I sort of collected all that information over the years and put it into one eight-page menu.”

Today, they are the same eight pages that the couple produced four years ago, filled with hearty food in generous helpings.

Looking back on his previous career, Maples said: “I think everybody who wants to open a restaurant should go work for Sysco for at least a year, to see how things work. I saw a lot of restaurants that didn’t make it — open one day and closed the next.”

The Oaks, as it is sometimes called, was itself closed for 11 months after the Rice Canyon fire in 2007. Reborn in April 2009, it has become the place where the Mapleses spend most of their time.

“I mean, it’s got its trials and tribulations,” Duke Maples said. “It’s hard — we’re here 12 or 14 hours a day — but we have fun. We meet a lot of neat people, and probably 90 percent of our staff has been here since we opened, so we have very little turnover.”

Because of their proximity to the freeway, the restaurant’s customer base hails from as far away as Ocean-side and Lake Elsinore, and motorcycle clubs from all corners of Southern California congregate here on the weekends — in part, as Jonell puts it, because “there’s everywhere to ride from here without even having to get on the freeway.”